Archaic Latin
Sources for studying the Archaic stage of Latin are rather scarce. Linguists define the time frame of the period from the 8th to the 5th century BC. Romans and citizens of other towns in Latium acquired the script in the 8th century from Italian Greeks whose colonies existed in Cumae and Neapolis, close to Rome. We will not describe the Roman script and its development in detail, but you can turn to a special page devoted to it (Roman Alphabet) instead. It seems that Etruscans who were at the time much more civilized than Italics gave them first skills in writing. But Latin people in fact did not use much of it, they were occupied by primitive agriculture and wrote no literature works. That is why inscriptions written on columns and walls of temples are the only thing left from Old Latin.
The earliest of them, as far as modern science has discovered, is the inscription on a fibula (a sort of a golden adornment) from Praeneste. It dates back from the late 7th century BC and reads the following:
Old-latin;Manios med fhe fhaked Numasioi
(Classical Latin; Manius me fecit Numerio)
(Spanish; Manio me hizo por numeros)
"Manius made me for Numerius"
Another quite ancient inscription is that found on the so called "black stone" which was found during archaeological works on the spot of the Roman forum. It is dated around 500 BC and reads:
quoi honc… sakros esed
(Classical qui hunc… sacer erit)
Other Archaic Latin inscriptions were written later and contain usually just a few words, mostly personal names, which is typical for ancient written examples. They were mostly written on burial stones, and only a few are official documents of the rising Roman Republic. Among them the most famous are the epitaphs of the Scipio family and the text of the Senate's order concerning temples of Bacchus in Rome.
The above mentioned documents allow us to get acquainted with the ancient stage of the Latin language, to understand better processes which were under way later. Archaic Latin stands much closer to the Proto-Indo-European stage. In phonetics, its major characteristic feature is the preservation of diphthongs, which were later partly simplified, partly disappeared. The examples are:
ai was preserved in cailavit, aire (spanish; aire & italian aria) (in classical Latin it turned to ae: caelavit, aer).
Latin words borrowed from Greek with this diphthong also made it ae (Thermopilae) au became long o in Classical Latin, though it was present in Archaic Latin: maurtia is the example (Latin mortis 'death')
ei also became a monophothong, long e in deus (Archaic Latin deivos);
another variant was long i in sive, si (Archaic Latin seive, sei 'if') (Spanish; "si" from C.L) & (Italian "se" from Old-latin)
oi changed its pronunciation to oe (Latin foederatio, Archaic Latin foideratei); this very oi turned to long u sound when in the beginning of the word: oino (spanish & italian; -uno-) 'one' becomes unus, una in Latin,
and the word comoinem (Classical Latin communem is the derivative from the same word unus with a prefix com- 'together', 'with')
Archaic Latin shows a strange diphthong which did not exist in Proto-Indo-European and was probably an Italic innovation: oe in coeravit 'he cured', Classical Latin form curavit with long u
again two different ways of reflection of the diphthong ou which existed in Archaic Latin met in the words iouestod, souad (Classical Latin developed u here) and cloulei (later oe)
The preservation of diphthongs is thus an archaic feature which later disappeared in the language. Oscan as the most conservative among Italic languages, preserved all them too, while Umbrian did not have the majority of them.
Archaic Latin phonetics used a number of other vowels which were changed in certain positions in the Classical period. But most of them were changed just due to assimilation processes:
a changed to e (Archaic Latin muliar, cuncaptum)
e to i (Archaic mereto, Classical merito 'by merits')
o to i (Archaic Primogenia, Classical Primigenia)
The letter u in Archaic Latin sometimes sounded a bit like modern German ue, and that is why could be replaced by i; later this sound coincided with original i. The example of this is Archaic lubs, Classical libens, liber (from IE *leudh- 'free people').
Old Latin consonants did not undergo those important changes we seen in the Classical period. Many original Italic phonemes sounded still archaic. For example, the initial b- in Latin bonus 'good, kind' originated from Archaic Latin dv- (dvenoi). Consonant sounds did not yet disappear in weak positions: like -v- between vowels in deivos 'a god', Latin deus. The final -d (which is quite important for the noun declension, because it was in the ablative singular ending) was still on its place; later it was dropped.
And one of the most significant features - Archaic Latin did not know the law of rhotacism, it preserved -s- between vowels (Numasioi > Nomerio, vetusia - Classical vetoria). This proves that rhotacism is not a Common Italic trait, it appeared rather late, but simultaneously in Latin and Umbrian (but not Oscan).
Other consonant changes are mostly kinds of assimilation (suepnos > somnus, adcedo > accedo, conquatsai > concussi)
Latin morphological system is the result of graduate simplification of the Indo-European original structure. The number of cases decreased, as well as the number of verbal grammar forms - moods, tenses, etc. Latin produced more analytic forms, which is typical for all Indo-European branches.
|
